"I can go on for hours with one chord. Just one chord, hammerin’,” the singer-songwriter Patti Smith advises a young musical disciple towards the end of Song to Song.

Terrence Malick, it turns out, is no different. The reclusive master’s latest opus glides past the 120 minute mark still tinkling away in the same tone it began in – one that also predominated in his 2015 Hollywood-set romantic odyssey Knight of Cups and vast tracts of his 2012 heartbreaker To The Wonder.

One man is as charming as the other is terrifying, and it’s an occasionally potent combination

These three latter-day Malicks – all minor-key, partner-swapping romances set in the present – have been turned out in uncharacteristically quick succession for the director. (His miraculous second and third features, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, came 20 years apart.) But even describing them as "of a piece" would undersell just how interchangeable so much of their look and substance feels.

Song to Song unfolds in and around the rock scene in Malick’s adopted home town of Austin, but you sense it wouldn’t be noticeably different if it had been set at a bacon factory or an ice rink. The sweat and throb and stink of the music business – all out-of-character stuff you’d love to see Malick grapple with – are conspicuous by their absence. In their place is yet another petal-hued, vetiver-spritzed Miltonian whisperscape, with attractive actors dancing the usual metaphysical love-ballet in shifting sunlight.

Two of the class of 2017, Michael Fassbender and Ryan Gosling, fare better than you might expect. Both men’s styles of movie-stardom might seem incompatibly different, but they mix well on the Malick palette.

Gosling plays BV, an affable singer-songwriter who’s offered a contract by Fassbender’s Cook, a fearsome record producer who lives in an impossibly expensive-looking glass-and-concrete cuboid. The film is far less intrigued by music than privilege: even the various cameoing rock stars, from John Lydon to Iggy Pop, are usually seen rambling away in VIP areas rather than singing.)

Malick being Malick, BV and Cook’s pact is an all-but-literally Faustian one. The artist’s soul is claimed via the rights to his lyrics – here, soul and talent are interchangeable – while his master is repeatedly likened to the Devil: during a black-and-white montage of falling stars halfway through the film, Cook even monologues about his own Lucifer-like descent.

The reclusive master’s latest opus: Song to Song

One man is as charming as the other is terrifying, and it’s an occasionally potent combination. There’s a nice scene in which the former tries on the latter’s jacket: “It makes you walk different,” BV muses, while Cook offers to buy him a hundred more like it.

In another sequence, during an impromptu private-jet trip to Mexico, Cook buys a mouth-squeaker from a hawker on the beach, and inexplicably starts acting like a monkey, flailing and screeching at his guests. It’s a genuinely unnerving bit of performance from an actor whose entire body throughout the film seems tight with threat.

Sex and Malick have never been an easy fit, but Song to Song plumbs new boreholes of cringe in that department

But it’s also bodies – female ones – that Song to Song keeps tripping over. Also present on the jaunt to Mexico is Faye (Rooney Mara), another would-be singer-songwriter who once worked as Cook’s secretary, and interned as his lover, in the hope of securing a record deal of her own.

The film’s plot comes at us artfully rumpled out of order – time frames criss-cross, clothes and hairstyles change in a blink, you’re trusted to join the dots – but at this point Faye is BV’s girlfriend, with Cook shooting her possessive looks from the sidelines. It’s dastardly behaviour, but no worse than what Malick’s camera gets up to, which can’t find a square millimetre of Mara’s midriff it doesn’t like. (Her actual musical ability and passions, on the other hand, we’re largely left to guess at.)

Sex and Malick have never been an easy fit, but Song to Song plumbs new boreholes of cringe in that department, and its various bedroom encounters, shot in the usual extreme wide-angle by the director’s regular cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, are gauzy and bloodless. The film is to sex as a lepidopterist is to a butterfly cabinet – it gets right in there with the magnifying glass, but perish the thought that anything might flap.

See also former Bond Girl Bérénice Marlohe, in the toweringly thankless role of a chic lesbian house-sitter, or Natalie Portman as a sugar-pink, bottle-blonde and unwittingly stunning diner waitress whom Cook seduces and corrupts. (Cate Blanchett also appears as Gosling’s mega-rich rebound fling, but barely registers.) Their stories don’t operate on anything other than a symbolic level, and become just more froth on the film’s meandering current.

Song to Song was formerly known as Weightless, which would have suited its drifting, twirling rhythms. At least its new title doesn’t invite an en-masse sigh of: “well, quite”.